Geek alert! What happens when you get two marketers into a room? THIS! Today’s guest is my friend and fellow marketer Mary Czarnecki -- who has impressive brands behind her name that she’s worked with and taught workshops too (like Johnson and Johnson, Starbucks, and WebMD). In the show notes below, I've pulled out some nuggets in Q & A format. Enjoy! Mallory: What’s a huge question people tend to ask you first? Mary: So the thing I really work with people on is helping them get out of that shiny object overwhelm.
So so many times, my first conversation with someone is, Hey, can you tell me about Facebook ads? Or hey, can you tell me how to do my social media? Hey, can you figure you know, someone told me I need an email? Why do I need an email list?
And so the first kind of opening the mind moment, for a lot of business owners I talked to, is that someone has told them to do something, or that they should be doing something that they're coming out of the space of overwhelm, or, you know, kind of a lack of confidence, because they're amazing at what they do, right? They’re confident that they can deliver, whatever it is, they're an expert in. But then all of a sudden, someone has said something to them, or they've read something that's now taken a knock at their kind of expert business owner confidence.
And they think that this tactic, this thing, this one platform or activity, they're missing out on or they should know about, or their competition is going to do and then steal over all their clients.
And so usually my question conversations are starting at the tactical level, but what I love doing is bringing people back their confidence by bringing the conversation up to the strategic level.
Mallory: This is perfect. It sounds like something I heard a few years ago by Val Geisler about just-in-time learning vs just-in-case learning.
When we’re unsure about what the best next move is, as business owners we typically default to learning something new or needing a new shiny tactic to make it all better.
That's what I see a lot with clients, too, is they have all these ideas, muddled in their head. They're trying to consume stuff. But there's nothing to be put in practice because there's just so much learning taking place.
So the new filter becomes “What do you need to know right this minute to do your goals you just talked about for the next 90 days?”
So the new filter becomes “What do you need to know right this minute to do your goals you just talked about for the next 90 days?”
- Mallory Schlabach
Mallory: Let’s talk about some must-dos small business owners and entrepreneurs need to focus on for marketing:
Mary: You need a roadmap that really breaks your marketing plan down into a system where you're actually looking at the conversion equation to figure out okay, you know, how am I literally bringing people into my world? How am I engaging them? How am I educating them so that they feel good making a decision to work with me? And then what am I literally offering them so it's, it's creating this kind of connection, nurture and conversion system, but on a level, that's not going to burn you out on a bunch of different route trials, or testing ideas.
Make sure your offers you’re putting out into the world and what you’re selling are actually tapping into their biggest hot button need so that you're not just talking to like, lower-level issues. Too many times we try to solve something that’s only painful enough to whine about -- not painful enough to do anything about it.
Find out what your market wants to buy. So many businesses put products out that they think are going to sell but the only focus group they've consulted is themselves, they
